The well-publicized debate at the Creation Museum was not about two minds sparring.

In 1878, the American scholar and minister Sebastian Adams put the final touches on the third edition of his grandest project: a massive Synchronological Chart that covers nothing less than the entire history of the world in parallel, with the deeds of kings and kingdoms running along together in rows over 25 horizontal feet of paper. When the chart reaches 1500 BCE, its level of detail becomes impressive; at 400 CE it becomes eyebrow-raising; at 1300 CE it enters the realm of the wondrous. No wonder, then, that in their 2013 book Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton call Adams' chart "nineteenth-century America's surpassing achievement in complexity and synthetic power... a great work of outsider thinking."

The chart is also the last thing that visitors to Kentucky's Creation Museum see before stepping into the gift shop, where full-sized replicas can be purchased for $40.

Further Reading

That's because, in the world described by the museum, Adams' chart is more than a historical curio; it remains an accurate timeline of world history. Time is said to have begun in 4004 BCE with the creation of Adam, who went on to live for 930 more years. In 2348 BCE, the Earth was then reshaped by a worldwide flood, which created the Grand Canyon and most of the fossil record even as Noah rode out the deluge in an 81,000 ton wooden ark. Pagan practices at the eight-story high Tower of Babel eventually led God to cause a "confusion of tongues" in 2247 BCE, which is why we speak so many different languages today.

Adams notes on the second panel of the chart that "all the history of man, before the flood, extant, or known to us, is found in the first six chapters of Genesis."

Ken Ham agrees. Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis (AIG), has become perhaps the foremost living young Earth creationist in the world. He has authored more books and articles than seems humanly possible and has built AIG into a creationist powerhouse. He also made national headlines when the slickly modern Creation Museum opened in 2007.

He has also been looking for the opportunity to debate a prominent supporter of evolution.

And so it was that, as a severe snow and sleet emergency settled over the Cincinnati region, 900 people climbed into cars and wound their way out toward the airport to enter the gates of the Creation Museum. They did not come for the petting zoo, the zip line, or the seasonal camel rides, nor to see the animatronic Noah chortle to himself about just how easy it had really been to get dinosaurs inside his Ark. They did not come to see The Men in White, a 22-minute movie that plays in the museum's halls in which a young woman named Wendy sees that what she's been taught about evolution "doesn't make sense" and is then visited by two angels who help her understand the truth of six-day special creation. They did not come to see the exhibits explaining how all animals had, before the Fall of humanity into sin, been vegetarians.

Further Reading

They came to see Ken Ham debate TV presenter Bill Nye the Science Guy—an old-school creation v. evolution throwdown for the Powerpoint age. Even before it began, the debate had been good for both men. Traffic to AIG's website soared by 80 percent, Nye appeared on CNN, tickets sold out in two minutes, and post-debate interviews were lined up with Piers Morgan Live and MSNBC.

While plenty of Ham supporters filled the parking lot, so did people in bow ties and "Bill Nye is my Homeboy" T-shirts. They all followed the stamped dinosaur tracks to the museum's entrance, where a pack of AIG staffers wearing custom debate T-shirts stood ready to usher them into "Discovery Hall."

Security at the Creation Museum is always tight; the museum's security force is made up of sworn (but privately funded) Kentucky peace officers who carry guns, wear flat-brimmed state trooper-style hats, and operate their own K-9 unit. For the debate, Nye and Ham had agreed to more stringent measures. Visitors passed through metal detectors complete with secondary wand screenings, packages were prohibited in the debate hall itself, and the outer gates were closed 15 minutes before the debate began.

Inside the hall, packed with bodies and the blaze of high-wattage lights, the temperature soared. The empty stage looked—as everything at the museum does—professionally designed, with four huge video screens, custom debate banners, and a pair of lecterns sporting Mac laptops. 20 different video crews had set up cameras in the hall, and 70 media organizations had registered to attend. More than 10,000 churches were hosting local debate parties. As AIG technical staffers made final preparations, one checked the YouTube-hosted livestream—242,000 people had already tuned in before start time.

An AIG official took the stage eight minutes before start time. "We know there are people who disagree with each other in this room," he said. "No cheering or—please—any disruptive behavior."

At 6:59pm, the music stopped and the hall fell silent but for the suddenly prominent thrumming of the air conditioning. For half a minute, the anticipation was electric, all eyes fixed on the stage, and then the countdown clock ticked over to 7:00pm and the proceedings snapped to life. Nye, wearing his traditional bow tie, took the stage from the left; Ham appeared from the right. The two shook hands in the center to sustained applause, and CNN's Tom Foreman took up his moderating duties.

Ham had won the coin toss backstage and so stepped to his lectern to deliver brief opening remarks. "Creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today's modern scientific era," he declared, blasting modern textbooks for "imposing the religion of atheism" on students.

"We're teaching people to think critically!" he said. "It's the creationists who should be teaching the kids out there."

And we were off.

Two kinds of science

Digging in the fossil fields of Colorado or North Dakota, scientists regularly uncover the bones of ancient creatures. No one doubts the existence of the bones themselves; they lie on the ground for anyone to observe or weigh or photograph. But in which animal did the bones originate? How long ago did that animal live? What did it look like? One of Ham's favorite lines is that the past "doesn't come with tags"—so the prehistory of a stegosaurus thigh bone has to be interpreted by scientists, who use their positions in the present to reconstruct the past.

For mainstream scientists, this is simply an obvious statement of our existential position. Until a real-life Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown finds a way to power a Delorean with a 1.21 gigawatt flux capacitor in order to shoot someone back through time to observe the flaring-forth of the Universe, the formation of the Earth, or the origins of life, or the prehistoric past can't be known except by interpretation. Indeed, this isn't true only of prehistory; as Nye tried to emphasize, forensic scientists routinely use what they know of nature's laws to reconstruct past events like murders.

For Ham, though, science is broken into two categories, "observational" and "historical," and only observational science is trustworthy. In the initial 30 minute presentation of his position, Ham hammered the point home.

"You don't observe the past directly," he said. "You weren't there."

Ham spoke with the polish of a man who has covered this ground a hundred times before, has heard every objection, and has a smooth answer ready for each one.

In Ham's world, only changes that we can observe directly are the proper domain of science. Thus, when confronted with the issue of speciation, Ham readily admits that contemporary lab experiments on fast-breeding creatures like mosquitoes can produce new species. But he says that's simply "micro-evolution" below the family level. He doesn't believe that scientists can observe "macro-evolution," such as the alteration of a lobe-finned fish into a tiger over millions of years.

Because they can't see historical events unfold, scientists must rely on reconstructions of the past. Those might be accurate, but they simply rely on too many "assumptions" for Ham to trust them. When confronted during the debate with evidence from ancient trees which have more rings than there are years on the Adams Sychronological Chart, Ham simply shrugged.

"We didn't see those layers laid down," he said.

To him, the calculus of "one ring, one year" is merely an assumption when it comes to the past—an assumption possibly altered by cataclysmic events such as Noah's flood.

In other words, "historical science" is dubious; we should defer instead to the "observational" account of someone who witnessed all past events: God, said to have left humanity an eyewitness account of the world's creation in the book of Genesis. All historical reconstructions should thus comport with this more accurate observational account.

Mainstream scientists don't recognize this divide between observational and historical ways of knowing (much as they reject Ham's distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution). Dinosaur bones may not come with tags, but neither does observed contemporary reality—think of a doctor presented with a set of patient symptoms, who then has to interpret what she sees in order to arrive at a diagnosis.

Given that the distinction between two kinds of science provides Ham's key reason for accepting the "eyewitness account" of Genesis as a starting point, it was unsurprising to see Nye take generous whacks at the idea. You can't observe the past? "That's what we do in astronomy," said Nye in his opening presentation. Since light takes time to get here, "All we can do in astronomy is look at the past. By the way, you're looking at the past right now."

Those in the present can study the past with confidence, Nye said, because natural laws are generally constant and can be used to extrapolate into the past.

"This idea that you can separate the natural laws of the past from the natural laws you have now is at the heart of our disagreement," Nye said. "For lack of a better word, it's magical. I've appreciated magic since I was a kid, but it's not what we want in mainstream science."

How do scientists know that these natural laws are correctly understood in all their complexity and interplay? What operates as a check on their reconstructions? That's where the predictive power of evolutionary models becomes crucial, Nye said. Those models of the past should generate predictions which can then be verified—or disproved—through observations in the present.

For instance, evolutionary models suggest that land-based tetrapods can all be traced back to primitive, fish-like creatures that first made their way out of the water and onto solid ground—creatures that aren't quite lungfish and yet aren't quite amphibians. For years, there was a big gap in the fossil record around this expected transition. Then, in 2004, a research team found a number of these "fishapods" in the Canadian Arctic.

"Tiktaalik looks like a cross between the primitive fish it lived amongst and the first four-legged animals," wrote the research team as they introduced their discovery to the world.

"What we want in science—science as practiced on the outside—is the ability to predict," said Nye, pointing to the examples of Tiktaalik in biological evolution and the results of the Cosmic Background Explorer mission in cosmology. Mainstream scientific predictions, even those focused on the past, can in fact be tested against reality. So far, however, "Mr. Ham and his worldview does not have this capability," Nye said. "It cannot make predictions and show results."

1229 Reader Comments

But, Computer science already figured it out. You need to code it, show me how it was coded so ingeniously by your theories? How it diverse and different systems were integrated, and how did the integration code about?

Here is your problem. You are trying to use computer science to describe biology.

I know when I say DNA, I'm discussing a much more complex system than a page of computer code. I describing a domain of machinery that is biological including complex chemical and electrical signaling and nano-scale motors and engines, chemical pathways and laboratories all working to gather to build from a complex network of codes more complex machinery and systems that communicate and integrate other complex systems to form a more complex organism. By force we are required to distill our arguments for the sake of efficiency and brevity. The evolutionary answers I read are simplistic and childish in nature that they betray a lack of understanding of how at the core foundation of our biology, of how human biology works. It is hard to make the evolutionary theory make sense in a petri dish but how in the mind of any deep thinker can make sense within human biology?

But, Computer science already figured it out. You need to code it, show me how it was coded so ingeniously by your theories? How it diverse and different systems were integrated, and how did the integration code about?

Here is your problem. You are trying to use computer science to describe biology.

I know when I say DNA, I'm discussing a much more complex system than a page of computer code. I describing a domain of machinery that is biological including complex chemical and electrical signaling and nano-scale motors and engines, chemical pathways and laboratories all working to gather to build from a complex network of codes more complex machinery and systems that communicate and integrate other complex systems to form a more complex organism. By force we are required to distill our arguments for the sake of efficiency and brevity. The evolutionary answers I read are simplistic and childish in nature that they betray a lack of understanding of how at the core foundation of our biology, of how human biology works. It is hard to make the evolutionary theory make sense in a petri dish but how in the mind of any deep thinker can make sense within human biology?

So, you want to dismiss all of evolutionary theory because it doesn't hand feed you the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything? Science isn't always about answers to big questions - the answers to the small and medium-sized ones can be awfully handy as well.

But, Computer science already figured it out. You need to code it, show me how it was coded so ingeniously by your theories? How it diverse and different systems were integrated, and how did the integration code about?

Here is your problem. You are trying to use computer science to describe biology.

I know when I say DNA, I'm discussing a much more complex system than a page of computer code. I describing a domain of machinery that is biological including complex chemical and electrical signaling and nano-scale motors and engines, chemical pathways and laboratories all working to gather to build from a complex network of codes more complex machinery and systems that communicate and integrate other complex systems to form a more complex organism. By force we are required to distill our arguments for the sake of efficiency and brevity. The evolutionary answers I read are simplistic and childish in nature that they betray a lack of understanding of how at the core foundation of our biology, of how human biology works. It is hard to make the evolutionary theory make sense in a petri dish but how in the mind of any deep thinker can make sense within human biology?

I have followed all your posts in this thread. All I see is incredulity on your part. I have seen nothing to indicate you are qualified to determine whether some comments here were "simplistic and childish". I am not even sure you understand evolutionary theory more than I do (and I don't know much). I would welcome being proven wrong.

What's embarrassing is that some will accept your answers above as proof of evolution. I read it and I'm serious and it's amazing how you can take that and think it somehow supports evolution.

As you are demonstrating, this is because you still have not allowed yourself to understand how evolution actually works.

Quote:

How did this code come about? And How did the whole system know to expand the skull to fit it in and where to put it. Then how did it integrate into the whole with every other system recoding to accommodate it, all simultaneously.

The underlying changes happen constantly, in the background, caused by everything that changes the genes of an organism. Random mutation, horizontal gene transfer, genetic recombination, whatever shakes up the genetic makeup of an organism. It doesn't have to "know" anything.These changes are always going on. When they don't have the right combination of genetic and other biological changes to make a successful new feature work, the organism bearing that genetic information dies off without leaving much (if any) offspring to continue bearing its signature line of unsuccessful genes. If the new genetic and other biological information actually works to create a successful evolutionary change that confers a benefit, the resulting line of genetic information bearing that change is passed on and favored because it out-competes the lines without such a change. Evolution is a constant, unceasing process of trial and error, with fairly strict quality controls, that functions very much like a theoretical free market. It happens in a naturalistic, unplanned fashion. It's not extremely efficient, either. The vast majority of genetic changes (e.g. by mutation) either make no difference to an organism's fitness, or are actually harmful. But because of selection, those harmful versions are not passed on easily. The rare beneficial change has an outsized effect because its success gives it a better chance at out-competing the alternatives, so it is actively promoted. While balance of underlying changes is tilted towards bad rather than good, the process of selection culls the bad and promotes the good that crops up. So the successful changes are over-represented in the final population relative to how frequently an underlying change is good or bad.

We are carefully going to go back to your random number analogy. Keep in mind that this is an allegory for the purposes of explaining how evolution works; it is not a pipe.

Let's say that we have an RNG that spits out perfectly random numbers. Let these random numbers represent the process of genetic changes, like mutation. We'll call this the input. In order to simulate the effect of natural selection, we'll say that odd numbers = good changes and even numbers = bad ones. So we'll have a step called "The Environment" that uses the process of selection to sift through and categorize the good changes (even numbers) and bad changes (odd numbers). We tell The Environment to discard some of each, but to do so for the bad changes more often than good changes. It doesn't even have to be a 100% thing, the difference between their discard rate could be something like 0.5% in favor of odd numbers being preserved. In order to simulate the process of multiple generations in a population, we'll take that initial output (but not the discarded numbers) and use them as a seed to generate more numbers in a process that favors breeding true (even begets even, odd begets odd) most of the time. Remember that mutations and changes to genes happen constantly, so even in highly similar genetic relations can produce offspring with a new genetic feature.

Given these very favorable conditions (a statistically equal amount of even and odd numbers generated to start with, and a very low selection factor), how long do you think it will take before almost all of the numbers being generated in this process are odd? Not long at all, really. The even numbers will be culled more often, so there will be fewer even numbers for the next generation (and some of the offspring of even numbers will wind up odd regardless). Repeat the cycle several times, and the effects of selection accumulate quickly. The odd numbers wind up reproducing faster than the even ones. The even ones can't keep up; the selection process means their kind are dwindling each time as the odd numbers (those we consider to have beneficial features that make them more successful at reproducing) outpace them.

Even if we tweak things so that the vast majority of initial numbers are unfit (even numbers) at the start of this experiment, which represents the real world where most changes are neutral or selected against, it doesn't take very long for repetitions of the process to make the odd numbers overtake and outpace them in the general population. Their success is boost beyond their initial frequency by the selection process.

This isn't just some kind of quasi-religious hoodoo. You can code up systems that simulate the process easily and see it happen in front of your eyes. You can make the system as sophisticated and realistic as you like regarding mutation rates, ratio of beneficial/harmful/(neutral?) mutations, the strength and number and types of selection factors, etc.

In fact, many people have done this. Red Lynx, for example. There are also numerous simulations that more or less faithfully recreate the famous Dawkins WEASEL program (and some are focused on realism more than the simplicity of the original). It's interesting to note of the latter that they were inspired by the claims of an ID proponent on an ID blog, who called for people to debunk Dawkins' argument by making their own WEASELs. Pretty much nobody on the ID side took up the challenge, while dozens of people on the evolution side did so with varying degrees of skill and complexity. They wound up debunking Dembski, not Dawkins.

As a software guy, perhaps you'll appreciate these demonstrations of the concept more readily than my clumsy description.

What's embarrassing is that some will accept your answers above as proof of evolution. I read it and I'm serious and it's amazing how you can take that and think it somehow supports evolution.

As you are demonstrating, this is because you still have not allowed yourself to understand how evolution actually works.

Quote:

How did this code come about? And How did the whole system know to expand the skull to fit it in and where to put it. Then how did it integrate into the whole with every other system recoding to accommodate it, all simultaneously.

The underlying changes happen constantly, in the background, caused by everything that changes the genes of an organism. Random mutation, horizontal gene transfer, genetic recombination, whatever shakes up the genetic makeup of an organism. It doesn't have to "know" anything.These changes are always going on. When they don't have the right combination of genetic and other biological changes to make a successful new feature work, the organism bearing that genetic information dies off without leaving much (if any) offspring to continue bearing its signature line of unsuccessful genes. If the new genetic and other biological information actually works to create a successful evolutionary change that confers a benefit, the resulting line of genetic information bearing that change is passed on and favored because it out-competes the lines without such a change. Evolution is a constant, unceasing process of trial and error, with fairly strict quality controls, that functions very much like a theoretical free market. It happens in a naturalistic, unplanned fashion. It's not extremely efficient, either. The vast majority of genetic changes (e.g. by mutation) either make no difference to an organism's fitness, or are actually harmful. But because of selection, those harmful versions are not passed on easily. The rare beneficial change has an outsized effect because its success gives it a better chance at out-competing the alternatives, so it is actively promoted. While balance of underlying changes is tilted towards bad rather than good, the process of selection culls the bad and promotes the good that crops up. So the successful changes are over-represented in the final population relative to how frequently an underlying change is good or bad.

We are carefully going to go back to your random number analogy. Keep in mind that this is an allegory for the purposes of explaining how evolution works; it is not a pipe.

Let's say that we have an RNG that spits out perfectly random numbers. Let these random numbers represent the process of genetic changes, like mutation. We'll call this the input. In order to simulate the effect of natural selection, we'll say that odd numbers = good changes and even numbers = bad ones. So we'll have a step called "The Environment" that uses the process of selection to sift through and categorize the good changes (even numbers) and bad changes (odd numbers). We tell The Environment to discard some of each, but to do so for the bad changes more often than good changes. It doesn't even have to be a 100% thing, the difference between their discard rate could be something like 0.5% in favor of odd numbers being preserved. In order to simulate the process of multiple generations in a population, we'll take that initial output (but not the discarded numbers) and use them as a seed to generate more numbers in a process that favors breeding true (even begets even, odd begets odd) most of the time. Remember that mutations and changes to genes happen constantly, so even in highly similar genetic relations can produce offspring with a new genetic feature.

Given these very favorable conditions (a statistically equal amount of even and odd numbers generated to start with, and a very low selection factor), how long do you think it will take before almost all of the numbers being generated in this process are odd? Not long at all, really. The even numbers will be culled more often, so there will be fewer even numbers for the next generation (and some of the offspring of even numbers will wind up odd regardless). Repeat the cycle several times, and the effects of selection accumulate quickly. The odd numbers wind up reproducing faster than the even ones. The even ones can't keep up; the selection process means their kind are dwindling each time as the odd numbers (those we consider to have beneficial features that make them more successful at reproducing) outpace them.

Even if we tweak things so that the vast majority of initial numbers are unfit (even numbers) at the start of this experiment, which represents the real world where most changes are neutral or selected against, it doesn't take very long for repetitions of the process to make the odd numbers overtake and outpace them in the general population. Their success is boost beyond their initial frequency by the selection process.

This isn't just some kind of quasi-religious hoodoo. You can code up systems that simulate the process easily and see it happen in front of your eyes. You can make the system as sophisticated and realistic as you like regarding mutation rates, ratio of beneficial/harmful/(neutral?) mutations, the strength and number and types of selection factors, etc.

In fact, many people have done this. Red Lynx, for example. There are also numerous simulations that more or less faithfully recreate the famous Dawkins WEASEL program (and some are focused on realism more than the simplicity of the original). It's interesting to note of the latter that they were inspired by the claims of an ID proponent on an ID blog, who called for people to debunk Dawkins' argument by making their own WEASELs. Pretty much nobody on the ID side took up the challenge, while dozens of people on the evolution side did so with varying degrees of skill and complexity. They wound up debunking Dembski, not Dawkins.

As a software guy, perhaps you'll appreciate these demonstrations of the concept more readily than my clumsy description.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism. The leap you have to make when dealing with a complex organism is a beneficial form of cancer. With a large population, this grown creature needs to then pass on this change to its entire system through its reproductive process which involves another creatures combined DNA. These mutations would have to occur within a population billions of times consecutively always propagating through generations after generations of the tribe.

But this is not what we observe, what we know as fact is that major leaps happened in complex organisms, such as the addition of natural intelligence along with physical changes throughout the creature to accommodate and complement this change. So whole new set of coding did not gradually mutate, it appeared in all its complexity. When I say complexity, I'm not talking Nuclear science complexity, I'm talking a thousands of times more complex.

I don't mean to offend anyone, though conversations like this will invariably. But, your explanation is like telling a kid that a stork delivered his baby brother. It's pedestrian, doesn't measure up to current scientific advancements and understandings. Evolutionary bioliogists, in my opinion and I'm sorry I'm not intentionally trying to offend anyone, are a 100 years behind the other sciences.

The evolutionary answers I read are simplistic and childish in nature that they betray a lack of understanding of how at the core foundation of our biology, of how human biology works.

The irony in everything you say is killing me.

Just remember: You're the one who implied that he could form coherent sentences.

They are coherent. They just have no intelligent content.

"How it diverse and different systems were integrated, and how did the integration code about?"

What you're saying is I need to take time to edit, but I'm not going to do that for a forum debate. A reasonable person can see through my mistakes and get the point behind it. I'm not writing a thesis.

What's embarrassing is that some will accept your answers above as proof of evolution. I read it and I'm serious and it's amazing how you can take that and think it somehow supports evolution.

As you are demonstrating, this is because you still have not allowed yourself to understand how evolution actually works.

Quote:

How did this code come about? And How did the whole system know to expand the skull to fit it in and where to put it. Then how did it integrate into the whole with every other system recoding to accommodate it, all simultaneously.

The underlying changes happen constantly, in the background, caused by everything that changes the genes of an organism. Random mutation, horizontal gene transfer, genetic recombination, whatever shakes up the genetic makeup of an organism. It doesn't have to "know" anything.These changes are always going on. When they don't have the right combination of genetic and other biological changes to make a successful new feature work, the organism bearing that genetic information dies off without leaving much (if any) offspring to continue bearing its signature line of unsuccessful genes. If the new genetic and other biological information actually works to create a successful evolutionary change that confers a benefit, the resulting line of genetic information bearing that change is passed on and favored because it out-competes the lines without such a change. Evolution is a constant, unceasing process of trial and error, with fairly strict quality controls, that functions very much like a theoretical free market. It happens in a naturalistic, unplanned fashion. It's not extremely efficient, either. The vast majority of genetic changes (e.g. by mutation) either make no difference to an organism's fitness, or are actually harmful. But because of selection, those harmful versions are not passed on easily. The rare beneficial change has an outsized effect because its success gives it a better chance at out-competing the alternatives, so it is actively promoted. While balance of underlying changes is tilted towards bad rather than good, the process of selection culls the bad and promotes the good that crops up. So the successful changes are over-represented in the final population relative to how frequently an underlying change is good or bad.

We are carefully going to go back to your random number analogy. Keep in mind that this is an allegory for the purposes of explaining how evolution works; it is not a pipe.

Let's say that we have an RNG that spits out perfectly random numbers. Let these random numbers represent the process of genetic changes, like mutation. We'll call this the input. In order to simulate the effect of natural selection, we'll say that odd numbers = good changes and even numbers = bad ones. So we'll have a step called "The Environment" that uses the process of selection to sift through and categorize the good changes (even numbers) and bad changes (odd numbers). We tell The Environment to discard some of each, but to do so for the bad changes more often than good changes. It doesn't even have to be a 100% thing, the difference between their discard rate could be something like 0.5% in favor of odd numbers being preserved. In order to simulate the process of multiple generations in a population, we'll take that initial output (but not the discarded numbers) and use them as a seed to generate more numbers in a process that favors breeding true (even begets even, odd begets odd) most of the time. Remember that mutations and changes to genes happen constantly, so even in highly similar genetic relations can produce offspring with a new genetic feature.

Given these very favorable conditions (a statistically equal amount of even and odd numbers generated to start with, and a very low selection factor), how long do you think it will take before almost all of the numbers being generated in this process are odd? Not long at all, really. The even numbers will be culled more often, so there will be fewer even numbers for the next generation (and some of the offspring of even numbers will wind up odd regardless). Repeat the cycle several times, and the effects of selection accumulate quickly. The odd numbers wind up reproducing faster than the even ones. The even ones can't keep up; the selection process means their kind are dwindling each time as the odd numbers (those we consider to have beneficial features that make them more successful at reproducing) outpace them.

Even if we tweak things so that the vast majority of initial numbers are unfit (even numbers) at the start of this experiment, which represents the real world where most changes are neutral or selected against, it doesn't take very long for repetitions of the process to make the odd numbers overtake and outpace them in the general population. Their success is boost beyond their initial frequency by the selection process.

This isn't just some kind of quasi-religious hoodoo. You can code up systems that simulate the process easily and see it happen in front of your eyes. You can make the system as sophisticated and realistic as you like regarding mutation rates, ratio of beneficial/harmful/(neutral?) mutations, the strength and number and types of selection factors, etc.

In fact, many people have done this. Red Lynx, for example. There are also numerous simulations that more or less faithfully recreate the famous Dawkins WEASEL program (and some are focused on realism more than the simplicity of the original). It's interesting to note of the latter that they were inspired by the claims of an ID proponent on an ID blog, who called for people to debunk Dawkins' argument by making their own WEASELs. Pretty much nobody on the ID side took up the challenge, while dozens of people on the evolution side did so with varying degrees of skill and complexity. They wound up debunking Dembski, not Dawkins.

As a software guy, perhaps you'll appreciate these demonstrations of the concept more readily than my clumsy description.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism. The leap you have to make when dealing with a complex organism is a beneficial form of cancer. With a large population, this grown creature needs to then pass on this change to its entire system through its reproductive process which involves another creatures combined DNA. These mutations would have to occur within a population billions of times consecutively always propagating through generations after generations of the tribe.

Pick up a freaking biology textbook, for the love of all that is good and not holy. No evolutionary biologist has proposed the mechanism you seem to think they are proposing.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism.

This is true, but not a problem. Typically, only mutations that wind up in the germ cells (sperm or ovum, pollen and seed, spores, etc.) are passed on. This is not as big of a problem as you think. Mutations happen even in the early stages of development, before cells have multiplied and differentiated into reproductive germ cells in the new individual. So any mutations happening after conception but before the body develops sufficiently can see mutation spread widely throughout the new organism. Also, germ cells experience mutations just as any other part of the body does. And sometimes a virus is involved in spreading genetic changes. It can carry bits of DNA from one host to another, and inside the host it can travel to and infect the germ cells. We have identified stretches of viral DNA in our own genome; they are genetic parasites, many of which we inherited from ancestral species (even those that we share with modern chimpanzees; both of us inherited the same set of parasites at the point from which we split, then accumulated our own unique viral parasites separately). So the viral DNA was incorporated into ours, including any DNA if might have picked up from a previous host. Almost 5% of our genome consists of such incorporated viruses, but they have been inactivated by mutations which shut them down. (That's one of the reasons we know that some DNA has no special function, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to make do before getting infected in our past and couldn't make do with the viruses being inactivated today). Retroviruses are one of the ways in which horizontal gene transfer can happen. We inherited them because they worked their way into the germ cells of our ancestors.

This kind of thing was discussed in one of the first links I gave you, talking about how we've observed new genetic material cropping up. Which is why you really should be paying closer attention.

What's embarrassing is that some will accept your answers above as proof of evolution. I read it and I'm serious and it's amazing how you can take that and think it somehow supports evolution.

As you are demonstrating, this is because you still have not allowed yourself to understand how evolution actually works.

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How did this code come about? And How did the whole system know to expand the skull to fit it in and where to put it. Then how did it integrate into the whole with every other system recoding to accommodate it, all simultaneously.

The underlying changes happen constantly, in the background, caused by everything that changes the genes of an organism. Random mutation, horizontal gene transfer, genetic recombination, whatever shakes up the genetic makeup of an organism. It doesn't have to "know" anything.These changes are always going on. When they don't have the right combination of genetic and other biological changes to make a successful new feature work, the organism bearing that genetic information dies off without leaving much (if any) offspring to continue bearing its signature line of unsuccessful genes. If the new genetic and other biological information actually works to create a successful evolutionary change that confers a benefit, the resulting line of genetic information bearing that change is passed on and favored because it out-competes the lines without such a change. Evolution is a constant, unceasing process of trial and error, with fairly strict quality controls, that functions very much like a theoretical free market. It happens in a naturalistic, unplanned fashion. It's not extremely efficient, either. The vast majority of genetic changes (e.g. by mutation) either make no difference to an organism's fitness, or are actually harmful. But because of selection, those harmful versions are not passed on easily. The rare beneficial change has an outsized effect because its success gives it a better chance at out-competing the alternatives, so it is actively promoted. While balance of underlying changes is tilted towards bad rather than good, the process of selection culls the bad and promotes the good that crops up. So the successful changes are over-represented in the final population relative to how frequently an underlying change is good or bad.

We are carefully going to go back to your random number analogy. Keep in mind that this is an allegory for the purposes of explaining how evolution works; it is not a pipe.

Let's say that we have an RNG that spits out perfectly random numbers. Let these random numbers represent the process of genetic changes, like mutation. We'll call this the input. In order to simulate the effect of natural selection, we'll say that odd numbers = good changes and even numbers = bad ones. So we'll have a step called "The Environment" that uses the process of selection to sift through and categorize the good changes (even numbers) and bad changes (odd numbers). We tell The Environment to discard some of each, but to do so for the bad changes more often than good changes. It doesn't even have to be a 100% thing, the difference between their discard rate could be something like 0.5% in favor of odd numbers being preserved. In order to simulate the process of multiple generations in a population, we'll take that initial output (but not the discarded numbers) and use them as a seed to generate more numbers in a process that favors breeding true (even begets even, odd begets odd) most of the time. Remember that mutations and changes to genes happen constantly, so even in highly similar genetic relations can produce offspring with a new genetic feature.

Given these very favorable conditions (a statistically equal amount of even and odd numbers generated to start with, and a very low selection factor), how long do you think it will take before almost all of the numbers being generated in this process are odd? Not long at all, really. The even numbers will be culled more often, so there will be fewer even numbers for the next generation (and some of the offspring of even numbers will wind up odd regardless). Repeat the cycle several times, and the effects of selection accumulate quickly. The odd numbers wind up reproducing faster than the even ones. The even ones can't keep up; the selection process means their kind are dwindling each time as the odd numbers (those we consider to have beneficial features that make them more successful at reproducing) outpace them.

Even if we tweak things so that the vast majority of initial numbers are unfit (even numbers) at the start of this experiment, which represents the real world where most changes are neutral or selected against, it doesn't take very long for repetitions of the process to make the odd numbers overtake and outpace them in the general population. Their success is boost beyond their initial frequency by the selection process.

This isn't just some kind of quasi-religious hoodoo. You can code up systems that simulate the process easily and see it happen in front of your eyes. You can make the system as sophisticated and realistic as you like regarding mutation rates, ratio of beneficial/harmful/(neutral?) mutations, the strength and number and types of selection factors, etc.

In fact, many people have done this. Red Lynx, for example. There are also numerous simulations that more or less faithfully recreate the famous Dawkins WEASEL program (and some are focused on realism more than the simplicity of the original). It's interesting to note of the latter that they were inspired by the claims of an ID proponent on an ID blog, who called for people to debunk Dawkins' argument by making their own WEASELs. Pretty much nobody on the ID side took up the challenge, while dozens of people on the evolution side did so with varying degrees of skill and complexity. They wound up debunking Dembski, not Dawkins.

As a software guy, perhaps you'll appreciate these demonstrations of the concept more readily than my clumsy description.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism. The leap you have to make when dealing with a complex organism is a beneficial form of cancer. With a large population, this grown creature needs to then pass on this change to its entire system through its reproductive process which involves another creatures combined DNA. These mutations would have to occur within a population billions of times consecutively always propagating through generations after generations of the tribe.

Pick up a freaking biology textbook, for the love of all that is good and not holy. No evolutionary biologist has proposed the mechanism you seem to think they are proposing.

This is why no one is taking you seriously.

No, you are right, what I am I'm trying to make sense of is how, when extended to a complex organism and within that organisms population, over many generations, the mechanism they are proposing would work to develop a highly complex component. It simply doesn't work. Even in a petri dish there is debate. Look at lacto bacteria and the different behaviors it exhibits based on its complex communication system. Turns out each behavior is coded and not a change but a different mode of operation, based on its sense of the surrounding bacterial population. The mechanism that this single celled organism developed to work intra inter species are each coded separately. Evolutionary science cannot begin to explain how this cell can evolve the capability to wrk within a like and unlike population. Developing such a complex communications system backed up by generating inter bacterial bacteriocins to protect its own larger population. And, you're going to sell me that mechanism that formed the natural intelligence component of man ...

The evolutionary answers I read are simplistic and childish in nature that they betray a lack of understanding of how at the core foundation of our biology, of how human biology works.

The irony in everything you say is killing me.

Just remember: You're the one who implied that he could form coherent sentences.

They are coherent. They just have no intelligent content.

"How it diverse and different systems were integrated, and how did the integration code about?"

What you're saying is I need to take time to edit, but I'm not going to do that for a forum debate. A reasonable person can see through my mistakes and get the point behind it. I'm not writing a thesis.

Neither are we, and most of us still find the time to ensure proper spelling, language, and word choice. If you don't care about your argument enough to state it clearly, why should any of us care about it?

According to Gould, it doesn't matter what a person's degrees are, if they don't accept evolution theory they aren't a real scientist. Therefore he can make the statement that all real scientists believe in evolution. Another example of circular reasoning, which they use all the time. Date the rock by the fossil, and the fossil by the rock.

Road-kill does not turn into a fossil on a regular basis, it requires sudden deep burial. Slow natural processes cannot account for trillions of fossils all over the place. Without a world-wide flood there would be very few fossils to examine. Factor in habitat, body density, and the ability to survive, and it fits the geologic column perfectly. The fossils are right where a great flood predicts they would be. Yet Nye insists the creationist model can't predict anything.

Human artifacts have been found in every rock strata. Ever hear of Ooparts? If it doesn't fit evolution theory just hide it in the basement of a museum and label it an anomaly. We'll figure it out later. You call that science? Nye said just one of those would convince him, but none of them have, he just looks for some way to explain them away. In radioactive dating they decide how old they want it to be and pick out a dating method that will yield the results they want. Evolution is a fairy tale for grownups that don't understand real science.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism.

This is true, but not a problem. Typically, only mutations that wind up in the germ cells (sperm or ovum, pollen and seed, spores, etc.) are passed on. This is not as big of a problem as you think. Mutations happen even in the early stages of development, before cells have multiplied and differentiated into reproductive germ cells in the new individual. So any mutations happening after conception but before the body develops sufficiently can see mutation spread widely throughout the new organism. Also, germ cells experience mutations just as any other part of the body does. And sometimes a virus is involved in spreading genetic changes. It can carry bits of DNA from one host to another, and inside the host it can travel to and infect the germ cells. We have identified stretches of viral DNA in our own genome; they are genetic parasites, many of which we inherited from ancestral species (even those that we share with modern chimpanzees; both of us inherited the same set of parasites at the point from which we split, then accumulated our own unique viral parasites separately). So the viral DNA was incorporated into ours, including any DNA if might have picked up from a previous host. Almost 5% of our genome consists of such incorporated viruses, but they have been inactivated by mutations which shut them down. (That's one of the reasons we know that some DNA has no special function, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to make do before getting infected in our past and couldn't make do with the viruses being inactivated today). Retroviruses are one of the ways in which horizontal gene transfer can happen. We inherited them because they worked their way into the germ cells of our ancestors.

This kind of thing was discussed in one of the first links I gave you, talking about how we've observed new genetic material cropping up. Which is why you really should be paying closer attention.

Ok, I appreciate the specificity, it has to occur in the germ cells. So that mutated sperm needs to combine with the an egg that would accept it. That slight mutation would then form another living creature who would pass it on within their egg or sperm. Now, that would need to keep happening a billion times and in such a way that it fit altogether to form what we now know to be our higher thinking faculties. Do you see the leap that has to occur when you extend the theory to its conclusion. We already know the end result and we think we know how it began. It's that huge leap of faith in between that I don't accept. Am I crazy to have such huge doubts?

Neither are we, and most of us still find the time to ensure proper spelling, language, and word choice. If you don't care about your argument enough to state it clearly, why should any of us care about it?

I do care, I just am trying to do this while I'm working on a big project. I spend a good portion of my life helping others with the money I make, but I need to make the money in order to help others. I don't mean on the evolutionary debate, my hobby is community service. So I have to control how much time I spend on debates.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism.

This is true, but not a problem. Typically, only mutations that wind up in the germ cells (sperm or ovum, pollen and seed, spores, etc.) are passed on. This is not as big of a problem as you think. Mutations happen even in the early stages of development, before cells have multiplied and differentiated into reproductive germ cells in the new individual. So any mutations happening after conception but before the body develops sufficiently can see mutation spread widely throughout the new organism. Also, germ cells experience mutations just as any other part of the body does. And sometimes a virus is involved in spreading genetic changes. It can carry bits of DNA from one host to another, and inside the host it can travel to and infect the germ cells. We have identified stretches of viral DNA in our own genome; they are genetic parasites, many of which we inherited from ancestral species (even those that we share with modern chimpanzees; both of us inherited the same set of parasites at the point from which we split, then accumulated our own unique viral parasites separately). So the viral DNA was incorporated into ours, including any DNA if might have picked up from a previous host. Almost 5% of our genome consists of such incorporated viruses, but they have been inactivated by mutations which shut them down. (That's one of the reasons we know that some DNA has no special function, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to make do before getting infected in our past and couldn't make do with the viruses being inactivated today). Retroviruses are one of the ways in which horizontal gene transfer can happen. We inherited them because they worked their way into the germ cells of our ancestors.

This kind of thing was discussed in one of the first links I gave you, talking about how we've observed new genetic material cropping up. Which is why you really should be paying closer attention.

Ok, I appreciate the specificity, it has to occur in the germ cells. So that mutated sperm needs to combine with the an egg that would accept it. That slight mutation would then form another living creature who would pass it on within their egg or sperm. Now, that would need to keep happening a billion times and in such a way that it fit altogether to form what we now know to be our higher thinking faculties. Do you see the leap that has to occur when you extend the theory to its conclusion. We already know the end result and we think we know how it began. It's that huge leap of faith in between that I don't accept. Am I crazy to have such huge doubts?

The generation time of E. coli is approximately 90 minutes, and the base mutation rate is 1 for every 109 bases replicated. The E. coli genome size is ~5 million base pairs (so 10 million bases replicated each cell division). Assume a nutrient-filled world with no competition--treat this like the primordial cell. Over 4 billion years, how many mutations will accumulate in this population of organisms, in total?

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism.

This is true, but not a problem. Typically, only mutations that wind up in the germ cells (sperm or ovum, pollen and seed, spores, etc.) are passed on. This is not as big of a problem as you think. Mutations happen even in the early stages of development, before cells have multiplied and differentiated into reproductive germ cells in the new individual. So any mutations happening after conception but before the body develops sufficiently can see mutation spread widely throughout the new organism. Also, germ cells experience mutations just as any other part of the body does. And sometimes a virus is involved in spreading genetic changes. It can carry bits of DNA from one host to another, and inside the host it can travel to and infect the germ cells. We have identified stretches of viral DNA in our own genome; they are genetic parasites, many of which we inherited from ancestral species (even those that we share with modern chimpanzees; both of us inherited the same set of parasites at the point from which we split, then accumulated our own unique viral parasites separately). So the viral DNA was incorporated into ours, including any DNA if might have picked up from a previous host. Almost 5% of our genome consists of such incorporated viruses, but they have been inactivated by mutations which shut them down. (That's one of the reasons we know that some DNA has no special function, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to make do before getting infected in our past and couldn't make do with the viruses being inactivated today). Retroviruses are one of the ways in which horizontal gene transfer can happen. We inherited them because they worked their way into the germ cells of our ancestors.

This kind of thing was discussed in one of the first links I gave you, talking about how we've observed new genetic material cropping up. Which is why you really should be paying closer attention.

Ok, I appreciate the specificity, it has to occur in the germ cells. So that mutated sperm needs to combine with the an egg that would accept it. That slight mutation would then form another living creature who would pass it on within their egg or sperm. Now, that would need to keep happening a billion times and in such a way that it fit altogether to form what we now know to be our higher thinking faculties. Do you see the leap that has to occur when you extend the theory to its conclusion. We already know the end result and we think we know how it began. It's that huge leap of faith in between that I don't accept. Am I crazy to have such huge doubts?

The generation time of E. coli is approximately 90 minutes, and the base mutation rate is 1 for every 109 bases replicated. The E. coli genome size is ~5 million base pairs (so 10 million bases replicated each cell division). Assume a nutrient-filled world with no competition--treat this like the primordial cell. Over 4 billion years, how many mutations will accumulate in this population of organisms, in total?

I have a follow-up to this, once you do that math.

But you know the problem, these mutations have to happen contiguously and accrue beneficially to form a new behavior that wasn't planned, anticipated or environmentally necessary. It's not rolling a 6 sided dice a million times, its rolling a billion sided dice a billion times and each time preserving the previous result adding to it and hoping that every other like organism is cooperating. In the end some function is created that somehow communes with another function and so on and so on. You have to stop looking at biology as being different from the other sciences or even the engineering sciences. At the core elements we have building blocks that have to be assembled and work together.

Earlier someone said you can't look at biology like the other sciences. And my reply in a loud voice is, that is why you evolutionary scientists just don't get it. You are not holding on to some mysterious formula. The science of life is well illustrated in the other sciences that we have come to depend on and we can verify as fact today without throwing billions of years at it.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism.

This is true, but not a problem. Typically, only mutations that wind up in the germ cells (sperm or ovum, pollen and seed, spores, etc.) are passed on. This is not as big of a problem as you think. Mutations happen even in the early stages of development, before cells have multiplied and differentiated into reproductive germ cells in the new individual. So any mutations happening after conception but before the body develops sufficiently can see mutation spread widely throughout the new organism. Also, germ cells experience mutations just as any other part of the body does. And sometimes a virus is involved in spreading genetic changes. It can carry bits of DNA from one host to another, and inside the host it can travel to and infect the germ cells. We have identified stretches of viral DNA in our own genome; they are genetic parasites, many of which we inherited from ancestral species (even those that we share with modern chimpanzees; both of us inherited the same set of parasites at the point from which we split, then accumulated our own unique viral parasites separately). So the viral DNA was incorporated into ours, including any DNA if might have picked up from a previous host. Almost 5% of our genome consists of such incorporated viruses, but they have been inactivated by mutations which shut them down. (That's one of the reasons we know that some DNA has no special function, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to make do before getting infected in our past and couldn't make do with the viruses being inactivated today). Retroviruses are one of the ways in which horizontal gene transfer can happen. We inherited them because they worked their way into the germ cells of our ancestors.

This kind of thing was discussed in one of the first links I gave you, talking about how we've observed new genetic material cropping up. Which is why you really should be paying closer attention.

Ok, I appreciate the specificity, it has to occur in the germ cells. So that mutated sperm needs to combine with the an egg that would accept it. That slight mutation would then form another living creature who would pass it on within their egg or sperm. Now, that would need to keep happening a billion times and in such a way that it fit altogether to form what we now know to be our higher thinking faculties. Do you see the leap that has to occur when you extend the theory to its conclusion. We already know the end result and we think we know how it began. It's that huge leap of faith in between that I don't accept. Am I crazy to have such huge doubts?

The generation time of E. coli is approximately 90 minutes, and the base mutation rate is 1 for every 109 bases replicated. The E. coli genome size is ~5 million base pairs (so 10 million bases replicated each cell division). Assume a nutrient-filled world with no competition--treat this like the primordial cell. Over 4 billion years, how many mutations will accumulate in this population of organisms, in total?

I have a follow-up to this, once you do that math.

But you know the problem, these mutations have to happen contiguously and accrue beneficially to form a new behavior that wasn't planned, anticipated or environmentally necessary. It's not rolling a 6 sided dice a million times, its rolling a billion sided dice a billion times and each time preserving the previous result adding to it and hoping that every other like organism is cooperating. In the end some function is created that somehow communes with another function and so on and so on. You have to stop looking at biology as being different from the other sciences or even the engineering sciences. At the core elements we have building blocks that have to be assembled and work together.

Earlier someone said you can't look at biology like the other sciences. And my reply in a loud voice is, that is why you evolutionary scientists just don't get it. You are not holding on to some mysterious formula. The science of life is well illustrated in the other sciences that we have come to depend on and we can verify as fact today without throwing billions of years at it.

No, do the fucking math, don't brush it aside. You don't get the benefit of the doubt once you compare your opponents to pedophiles.

What was said is that you can't compare COMPUTER SCIENCE, which is not actually science, to biology.

Road-kill does not turn into a fossil on a regular basis, it requires sudden deep burial. Slow natural processes cannot account for trillions of fossils all over the place.

Why not? We have billions of square miles that have been traversed by layer upon layer of living things for billions of years. We actually have relatively few fossils compared to the number of things that have ever lived.

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Without a world-wide flood there would be very few fossils to examine. Factor in habitat, body density, and the ability to survive, and it fits the geologic column perfectly. The fossils are right where a great flood predicts they would be.

This isn't true. A disastrous flood would not lay down orderly layers of organisms in a uniform way over much of the world at once, and then move on to the next sequence. Almost everything would be killed at once, and we'd see a disorderly jumble of fossils. Instead when we look at the strata in sequence we see a progression of organisms. We would not have layers with distinctive forms of life like Cambrian, Precambrian, Mesozoic, Pleistocene, etc. Where are the Triassic elephants? Where are the modern brachiosaurs? The Precambrian parrots? We find fossils laid down in layers that only makes sense in terms of gradual evolution over hundreds of millions of years.

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Human artifacts have been found in every rock strata. Ever hear of Ooparts?

A term coined by somebody who isn't an actual archeologist, let alone a paleontologist. We don't actually find genuine human artefacts encased in every strata. Often we find human tools and such in places where humans have previously mined, dug, or dropped something into a cave or a stream. Sometimes they're outright hoaxes.

But you know the problem, these mutations have to happen contiguously and accrue beneficially to form a new behavior that wasn't planned, anticipated or environmentally necessary. It's not rolling a 6 sided dice a million times, its rolling a billion sided dice a billion times and each time preserving the previous result adding to it and hoping that every other like organism is cooperating.

No, it's more like rolling a d6 six billion times at once, and then repeating. At each step, a favorable roll is saved and added to the next step because good changes tend to stay fixed until something better comes along. Remember, a population is a group of organisms reproducing in parallel, not just serially. And after eat parallel iteration, you perform another. Add in sexual reproduction and the chance of preserving and combining separate beneficial mutations goes up astronomically; bloodlines that used to be separate can come together so that an individual can have the benefits of several separate parallel lineages combined into itself, and it will pass much of this (and probably some unique beneficial features from its mate) on to its offspring. In this way, traits that are beneficial can quickly establish themselves throughout the population. It's not a strictly linear series affair, it's a series of parallel and converging trials with favorable traits given a leg up and unfavorable traits held back because of selection. Have you tried the Red Lynx population genetics simulator yet? These concepts are built into it. You can see for yourself how it works.

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In the end some function is created that somehow communes with another function and so on and so on.

What you don't get is that A) completely novel functions don't crop up often, it's more a case that an existing function is modified slightly, and B) the combinations of slightly different functions that don't work very well are selected against, and those that do work are selected for, and those that don't make a difference just go about their business. So if a combination of mutations doesn't work out? No big deal, that combination is weeded out of the gene pool by competition from the more successful combinations.

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You have to stop looking at biology as being different from the other sciences or even the engineering sciences.

What YOU have to do is familiarize yourself with the actual theory of evolution first, THEN criticize it. You are not, and have not been, in a position to tell us why it doesn't work. Because you don't understand it. You continue to misunderstand it. Instead of arguing with us, saying "but that's impossible because X!" you need to say to yourself, "okay, I don't know how that works. What I understand is that X is the case. Is that not the case? I should ask for some clarification from the people who know the subject."

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Earlier someone said you can't look at biology like the other sciences. And my reply in a loud voice is, that is why you evolutionary scientists just don't get it. You are not holding on to some mysterious formula. The science of life is well illustrated in the other sciences that we have come to depend on and we can verify as fact today without throwing billions of years at it.

What you don't get is that evolution ISN'T special in regards to other sciences. It is discovered and described and explored by the exact same method. The fact that you have not familiarized yourself with the findings of that method, yet you are here to tell us how wrong the findings are, does not speak well for your scientific competence in general. You may have specialist knowledge pertaining to the computer sciences, but you have not found the key to translate any understanding of those concepts into the necessary concepts needed to understand evolution. We are trying to give you this understanding, but you keep being argumentative about it despite your demonstrable ignorance.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism.

This is true, but not a problem. Typically, only mutations that wind up in the germ cells (sperm or ovum, pollen and seed, spores, etc.) are passed on. This is not as big of a problem as you think. Mutations happen even in the early stages of development, before cells have multiplied and differentiated into reproductive germ cells in the new individual. So any mutations happening after conception but before the body develops sufficiently can see mutation spread widely throughout the new organism. Also, germ cells experience mutations just as any other part of the body does. And sometimes a virus is involved in spreading genetic changes. It can carry bits of DNA from one host to another, and inside the host it can travel to and infect the germ cells. We have identified stretches of viral DNA in our own genome; they are genetic parasites, many of which we inherited from ancestral species (even those that we share with modern chimpanzees; both of us inherited the same set of parasites at the point from which we split, then accumulated our own unique viral parasites separately). So the viral DNA was incorporated into ours, including any DNA if might have picked up from a previous host. Almost 5% of our genome consists of such incorporated viruses, but they have been inactivated by mutations which shut them down. (That's one of the reasons we know that some DNA has no special function, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to make do before getting infected in our past and couldn't make do with the viruses being inactivated today). Retroviruses are one of the ways in which horizontal gene transfer can happen. We inherited them because they worked their way into the germ cells of our ancestors.

This kind of thing was discussed in one of the first links I gave you, talking about how we've observed new genetic material cropping up. Which is why you really should be paying closer attention.

Ok, I appreciate the specificity, it has to occur in the germ cells. So that mutated sperm needs to combine with the an egg that would accept it. That slight mutation would then form another living creature who would pass it on within their egg or sperm. Now, that would need to keep happening a billion times and in such a way that it fit altogether to form what we now know to be our higher thinking faculties. Do you see the leap that has to occur when you extend the theory to its conclusion. We already know the end result and we think we know how it began. It's that huge leap of faith in between that I don't accept. Am I crazy to have such huge doubts?

The generation time of E. coli is approximately 90 minutes, and the base mutation rate is 1 for every 109 bases replicated. The E. coli genome size is ~5 million base pairs (so 10 million bases replicated each cell division). Assume a nutrient-filled world with no competition--treat this like the primordial cell. Over 4 billion years, how many mutations will accumulate in this population of organisms, in total?

I have a follow-up to this, once you do that math.

But you know the problem, these mutations have to happen contiguously and accrue beneficially to form a new behavior that wasn't planned, anticipated or environmentally necessary. It's not rolling a 6 sided dice a million times, its rolling a billion sided dice a billion times and each time preserving the previous result adding to it and hoping that every other like organism is cooperating. In the end some function is created that somehow communes with another function and so on and so on. You have to stop looking at biology as being different from the other sciences or even the engineering sciences. At the core elements we have building blocks that have to be assembled and work together.

Earlier someone said you can't look at biology like the other sciences. And my reply in a loud voice is, that is why you evolutionary scientists just don't get it. You are not holding on to some mysterious formula. The science of life is well illustrated in the other sciences that we have come to depend on and we can verify as fact today without throwing billions of years at it.

No, do the fucking math, don't brush it aside. You don't get the benefit of the doubt once you compare your opponents to pedophiles.

What was said is that you can't compare COMPUTER SCIENCE, which is not actually science, to biology.

So you have a mutated e coli, now extend that to a complete complex functional system that performs functions that no e coli eve performed or needs to perform. You want to use the gentle slope argument, that these mutations continued to happen and eventually a complex eye was formed. But, what you fail to understand or grasp is that the mutations die and other mutations continue and die billions and billions of times and never do they ever turn into anything else but mutating e coli. There is no gentle slope to climb and there is no easy way to go from e coli to a complex organism. The changes that have to occur once complexity sets in are to great. You cannot layer natural intelligence over an Ape and change all its complex systems to accommodate it using the e coli theory. It just doesn't work outside a misguided philosophers mind.

I understand your argument and your reasoning for the first half above on mutations and changes. I really do, and I see why some people would walk away satisfied. But here is why i am not satisfied: In a complex organism no single mutation in a single cell of a complex organism can propagate the change to other cells or the sperm without a viral component that would inject the new code throughout the organism.

This is true, but not a problem. Typically, only mutations that wind up in the germ cells (sperm or ovum, pollen and seed, spores, etc.) are passed on. This is not as big of a problem as you think. Mutations happen even in the early stages of development, before cells have multiplied and differentiated into reproductive germ cells in the new individual. So any mutations happening after conception but before the body develops sufficiently can see mutation spread widely throughout the new organism. Also, germ cells experience mutations just as any other part of the body does. And sometimes a virus is involved in spreading genetic changes. It can carry bits of DNA from one host to another, and inside the host it can travel to and infect the germ cells. We have identified stretches of viral DNA in our own genome; they are genetic parasites, many of which we inherited from ancestral species (even those that we share with modern chimpanzees; both of us inherited the same set of parasites at the point from which we split, then accumulated our own unique viral parasites separately). So the viral DNA was incorporated into ours, including any DNA if might have picked up from a previous host. Almost 5% of our genome consists of such incorporated viruses, but they have been inactivated by mutations which shut them down. (That's one of the reasons we know that some DNA has no special function, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to make do before getting infected in our past and couldn't make do with the viruses being inactivated today). Retroviruses are one of the ways in which horizontal gene transfer can happen. We inherited them because they worked their way into the germ cells of our ancestors.

This kind of thing was discussed in one of the first links I gave you, talking about how we've observed new genetic material cropping up. Which is why you really should be paying closer attention.

Ok, I appreciate the specificity, it has to occur in the germ cells. So that mutated sperm needs to combine with the an egg that would accept it. That slight mutation would then form another living creature who would pass it on within their egg or sperm. Now, that would need to keep happening a billion times and in such a way that it fit altogether to form what we now know to be our higher thinking faculties. Do you see the leap that has to occur when you extend the theory to its conclusion. We already know the end result and we think we know how it began. It's that huge leap of faith in between that I don't accept. Am I crazy to have such huge doubts?

The generation time of E. coli is approximately 90 minutes, and the base mutation rate is 1 for every 109 bases replicated. The E. coli genome size is ~5 million base pairs (so 10 million bases replicated each cell division). Assume a nutrient-filled world with no competition--treat this like the primordial cell. Over 4 billion years, how many mutations will accumulate in this population of organisms, in total?

I have a follow-up to this, once you do that math.

But you know the problem, these mutations have to happen contiguously and accrue beneficially to form a new behavior that wasn't planned, anticipated or environmentally necessary. It's not rolling a 6 sided dice a million times, its rolling a billion sided dice a billion times and each time preserving the previous result adding to it and hoping that every other like organism is cooperating. In the end some function is created that somehow communes with another function and so on and so on. You have to stop looking at biology as being different from the other sciences or even the engineering sciences. At the core elements we have building blocks that have to be assembled and work together.

Earlier someone said you can't look at biology like the other sciences. And my reply in a loud voice is, that is why you evolutionary scientists just don't get it. You are not holding on to some mysterious formula. The science of life is well illustrated in the other sciences that we have come to depend on and we can verify as fact today without throwing billions of years at it.

We clearly cannot ignore the other sciences when looking at evolution. Evolution is a part of biology, biology is an applied form of chemistry, and chemistry is an applied form of physics. I believe what was said earlier is that evolution cannot directly be compared to computer science, which is true.

As to your earlier question ("Am I crazy to have such huge doubts?"), no. You aren't crazy to have doubts. Doubts lead to questions and questions lead to answers (and more questions). But again, you have to be open to the results of the questions you ask.

The generation time of E. coli is approximately 90 minutes, and the base mutation rate is 1 for every 109 bases replicated. The E. coli genome size is ~5 million base pairs (so 10 million bases replicated each cell division). Assume a nutrient-filled world with no competition--treat this like the primordial cell. Over 4 billion years, how many mutations will accumulate in this population of organisms, in total?

I have a follow-up to this, once you do that math.

But you know the problem, these mutations have to happen contiguously and accrue beneficially to form a new behavior that wasn't planned, anticipated or environmentally necessary. It's not rolling a 6 sided dice a million times, its rolling a billion sided dice a billion times and each time preserving the previous result adding to it and hoping that every other like organism is cooperating. In the end some function is created that somehow communes with another function and so on and so on. You have to stop looking at biology as being different from the other sciences or even the engineering sciences. At the core elements we have building blocks that have to be assembled and work together.

Earlier someone said you can't look at biology like the other sciences. And my reply in a loud voice is, that is why you evolutionary scientists just don't get it. You are not holding on to some mysterious formula. The science of life is well illustrated in the other sciences that we have come to depend on and we can verify as fact today without throwing billions of years at it.

No, do the fucking math, don't brush it aside. You don't get the benefit of the doubt once you compare your opponents to pedophiles.

What was said is that you can't compare COMPUTER SCIENCE, which is not actually science, to biology.

So you have a mutated e coli, now extend that to a complete complex functional system that performs functions that no e coli eve performed or needs to perform. You want to use the gentle slope argument, that these mutations continued to happen and eventually a complex eye was formed. But, what you fail to understand or grasp is that the mutations die and other mutations continue and die billions and billions of times and never do they ever turn into anything else but mutating e coli. There is no gentle slope to climb and there is no easy way to go from e coli to a complex organism. The changes that have to occur once complexity sets in are to great. You cannot layer natural intelligence over an Ape and change all its complex systems to accommodate it using the e coli theory. It just doesn't work outside a misguided philosophers mind.

DO. THE. FUCKING. MATH. YOU. LAZY. BUM.

How many times over will a freely replicating cell produce enough progeny to sample the entire set of possible configurations of 5 million base pairs in 4 billion years? And try telling me that every one of those possible configurations could still be called E. coli.

Road-kill does not turn into a fossil on a regular basis, it requires sudden deep burial. Slow natural processes cannot account for trillions of fossils all over the place.

Why not? We have billions of square miles that have been traversed by layer upon layer of living things for billions of years. We actually have relatively few fossils compared to the number of things that have ever lived.

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Without a world-wide flood there would be very few fossils to examine. Factor in habitat, body density, and the ability to survive, and it fits the geologic column perfectly. The fossils are right where a great flood predicts they would be.

This isn't true. A disastrous flood would not lay down orderly layers of organisms in a uniform way over much of the world at once, and then move on to the next sequence. Almost everything would be killed at once, and we'd see a disorderly jumble of fossils. Instead when we look at the strata in sequence we see a progression of organisms. We would not have layers with distinctive forms of life like Cambrian, Precambrian, Mesozoic, Pleistocene, etc. Where are the Triassic elephants? Where are the modern brachiosaurs? The Precambrian parrots? We find fossils laid down in layers that only makes sense in terms of gradual evolution over hundreds of millions of years.

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Human artifacts have been found in every rock strata. Ever hear of Ooparts?

A term coined by somebody who isn't an actual archeologist, let alone a paleontologist. We don't actually find genuine human artefacts encased in every strata. Often we find human tools and such in places where humans have previously mined, dug, or dropped something into a cave or a stream. Sometimes they're outright hoaxes.

But you know the problem, these mutations have to happen contiguously and accrue beneficially to form a new behavior that wasn't planned, anticipated or environmentally necessary. It's not rolling a 6 sided dice a million times, its rolling a billion sided dice a billion times and each time preserving the previous result adding to it and hoping that every other like organism is cooperating.

No, it's more like rolling a d6 six billion times at once, and then repeating. At each step, a favorable roll is saved and added to the next step because good changes tend to stay fixed until something better comes along. Remember, a population is a group of organisms reproducing in parallel, not just serially. And after eat parallel iteration, you perform another. Add in sexual reproduction and the chance of preserving and combining separate beneficial mutations goes up astronomically; bloodlines that used to be separate can come together so that an individual can have the benefits of several separate parallel lineages combined into itself, and it will pass much of this (and probably some unique beneficial features from its mate) on to its offspring. In this way, traits that are beneficial can quickly establish themselves throughout the population. It's not a strictly linear series affair, it's a series of parallel and converging trials with favorable traits given a leg up and unfavorable traits held back because of selection. Have you tried the Red Lynx population genetics simulator yet? These concepts are built into it. You can see for yourself how it works.

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In the end some function is created that somehow communes with another function and so on and so on.

What you don't get is that A) completely novel functions don't crop up often, it's more a case that an existing function is modified slightly, and B) the combinations of slightly different functions that don't work very well are selected against, and those that do work are selected for, and those that don't make a difference just go about their business. So if a combination of mutations doesn't work out? No big deal, that combination is weeded out of the gene pool by competition from the more successful combinations.

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You have to stop looking at biology as being different from the other sciences or even the engineering sciences.

What YOU have to do is familiarize yourself with the actual theory of evolution first, THEN criticize it. You are not, and have not been, in a position to tell us why it doesn't work. Because you don't understand it. You continue to misunderstand it. Instead of arguing with us, saying "but that's impossible because X!" you need to say to yourself, "okay, I don't know how that works. What I understand is that X is the case. Is that not the case? I should ask for some clarification from the people who know the subject."

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Earlier someone said you can't look at biology like the other sciences. And my reply in a loud voice is, that is why you evolutionary scientists just don't get it. You are not holding on to some mysterious formula. The science of life is well illustrated in the other sciences that we have come to depend on and we can verify as fact today without throwing billions of years at it.

What you don't get is that evolution ISN'T special in regards to other sciences. It is discovered and described and explored by the exact same method. The fact that you have not familiarized yourself with the findings of that method, yet you are here to tell us how wrong the findings are, does not speak well for your scientific competence in general. You may have specialist knowledge pertaining to the computer sciences, but you have not found the key to translate any understanding of those concepts into the necessary concepts needed to understand evolution. We are trying to give you this understanding, but you keep being argumentative about it despite your demonstrable ignorance.

I understand your point of view, but my argument is that you've built these mysterious mechanisms that you cannot support and you use them within your arguments. At the very core of this gentle mountain that you climb over billions of years is this concept of "natural selection" But, you haven't proven it as true. You can't, you have to believe that this selection process is able to weed out DNA coding that will not work as other code is added to it. Well what makes it a bad mutation at the micro level? What is the determining factor that one mutation will be kept and another discarded. Selection becomes an article of blind faith. Why, because we know the end result was a human eye, so we have to believe that selection kept the mutations that resulted over billions of years into the human eye. We have an eye and we must believe in evolution so this selection must work. How is that a real proof?

We start down the path of trying to explain how complex systems with many inter and intra related complex subsystems, entailing not just chemical but also electrical and mechanical systems, not only to mention quantum processing, and some guy comes along and says, well mutations over billions of years by means of gradual selection. And, I'm supposed to walk away satisfied. Don't be offended, you're still telling the stork dropped the baby off. Evolutionary science fails to explain the important things and you need blind faith to see it extended in the life around us from mutations based on selection.

So you have a mutated e coli, now extend that to a complete complex functional system that performs functions that no e coli eve performed or needs to perform. You want to use the gentle slope argument, that these mutations continued to happen and eventually a complex eye was formed.

Not even an eye, how about the ability to eat citrate? That's something which doesn't natively exist in E. coli, in fact the lack of it helps set E. coli apart from related bacteria. But under the right conditions, it can spontaneously arise. I say "spontaneously" here in the sense that nobody designed and implemented the metabolic pathway, it arose unguided from regular, natural, step-wise mutations in the population when there was a strong selective pressure. It didn't pop up all the time, just once. But in the wild, once is often enough. If a new feature crops up that helps an organism out-compete its relatives, the new organism's beneficial DNA will start to make up more and more of the gene pool. Why? Because that trait is passed down to its offspring, which are also more successful than their competitors, enabling them to produce more of their own offspring, and then you have the evens-and-odds situation.

You're arguing as if somebody proposed that a disembodied, lone eye evolved from mutant E. coli and somehow integrated itself into an existing organism to serve as that organism's new eye. That's not what we're saying at all, nobody expects that to happen. We are talking about features of an organism arising through the evolution of that organism's lineage.

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There is no gentle slope to climb and there is no easy way to go from e coli to a complex organism.

Yes there is. Single-celled organism -> colony of single-celled organisms -> specialized cells within a colony -> multicellular organism. Simple multicellular organisms can become more comlex multicellular organisms. Multicellularity has been independently evolved at least 25 times. Lab experiments like those conducted by Martin Boraas have been conducted which caused single-celled algae to form colonial groups of about 8 cells. In order to do so, they had to evolve a means of sticking together, excluding other cells once a certain size was reached, and controlling their own division so that they don't become too large by producing too many algae cells (bigger clumps of cells than 8 are too "shady" for light to pass through them efficiently and ensure even photosynthesis to all the cells). This kind of finding has been repeated by others, even using yeast instead of algae. Why did they form multicellular arrangements? Because it helped them escape predation by an organism that was large enough to eat single algae cells, but not large enough to consume multicellular bodies. That's the selective pressure. It didn't take long for this selective pressure to produce multicellular-like clumps of single-celled algae where there were none before. How can something as complex as multicellularity evolve like that? Probably because single-celled algae have features that enable cell-to-cell communication by chemical means. Random changes and mutations are constantly tweaking the chemicals and their communicator structures, but because there's normally selective advantage any combination of changes that resulted in multicellularity wouldn't be preserved. Until you introduce a predator that spells death to singular cells. Then the selective pressure starts to favor any random change going on at the time which happened to encourage cells to stick together. The existing features, which were being constantly tweaked by mutations anyway, became co-opted to serve a different function and that co-option was favored by the selective pressure of predation.Notice the emphasis on the gradual changes to existing features rather than the wholesale generation of new features out of thin air? That's how evolution normally works.

How many times over will a freely replicating cell produce enough progeny to sample the entire set of possible configurations of 5 million base pairs in 4 billion years? And try telling me that every one of those possible configurations could still be called E. coli.

It's a bogus example. Each division results in some cells inheriting the old parts, the younger cells also age and die. But one thing is certain, e. coli after 4 billion years is still e. coli. It never turns into anything else. I make my own yogurt every week, I count on my lacto bacteria always producing more lacto bacteria. Here's the interesting thing, I need to keep them fed and at the right temperature for them to survive and thrive. I have to make sure none of their predators enter the mix and when some do, the yogurt benefits by giving it a slightly different flavor. However, the next batch the flavor resets, because the lacto bacteria produces a bacteriocin called nisin that will then kill this intruder and make sure it doesn't live on in the starter culture. Unless of course the predator is able to multiply to a large enough population and then through its own communication system with its fellow mates, its starts simultaneously giving off its own toxins that target the lacto bacteria and wipes out my good culture.

But with my watchful eye and maintaining a good environment that hasn't happened yet. My point is, the very e. coli population will not allow a serious threat to its homogeneity to accommodate the very selection process that you require for your theory.

You know, ironically, he might not be learning a damn thing, but I'm learning a lot.

You guys are truly doing yeoman's work and should be commended. I plan on saving or bookmarking the last few pages because, taken together, the posts constitute not just a series of perfect rebuttals to all the "skeptical" evolution arguments but comprise a great little biology course all by themselves.

It's always the most close-minded, lazy-thinking, incapable-of-listening people who strike the most condescending "You guys don't get it" pose, isn't it?

What was said is that you can't compare COMPUTER SCIENCE, which is not actually science, to biology.

You can easily compare computer science (which is math) to biology, and in fact the comparison is very enlightening. You just need to make sure the math you're using is relevant to biology.

Genetic Algorithms give a mathematical description of how evolution works. And because it's CS, and therefore just math, the description is very general. Any problem whose solution can be encoded as a series of bits (and all information can be encoded as bits, with DNA being a trivial case), and where a population of solutions are randomly modified and then selected according to a fitness function, are subject to the math of Genetic Algorithms. That math says that this process of modification and selection will find local maximums in the solution space -- without any part of the system needing any knowledge about the shape of that solution space*, or any knowledge of what a solution should look like "in the future"! The only thing needed is a method of judging the quality of solutions to decide which should propagate**.

Genetic Algorithms also tells us that once the population converges on a local maximum, given enough time part of the population may jump across a valley to another region with a different local maximum. Also, if the fitness landscape changes, then the population can rapidly change to a new local maximum or even maximums.

And all this can be demonstrated! People actually use GAs all the time to solve engineering problems with hundreds of thousands of variables, or to program FPGAs to conduct complex data processing, or even to create software. The math says it works, practical demonstrations say it works.

This is what Computer Science tells us about evolution: It has sound mathematical backing. It will work. There's no reason to believe it wouldn't.

Stingerman, your problem is that you're treating "Computer Science" as though it's just computer programming. You look at your nice elegant software and think that of course this couldn't have been slapped together randomly. Well of course you couldn't do that yourself. There's only one of you and you'd never be able to iterate rapidly enough to get sufficient generations (not to mention humans suck at "random"). But if you instead wrote software to do that for you so that you can get a population of more than 1, and many, many iterations, then you would find that you can randomly slap together a working program. It would probably not be elegant in every way. It would probably be messy, and suboptimal in some respects. If you started with a solution from an older problem, the new solution might carry a lot of seemingly useless cruft. But in other respects it might use what strikes you as extremely clever solutions you never would have thought of yourself.

I get that you aren't into evolutionary biology. But you should definitely check out Genetic Algorithms. They are fascinating for their own sake, but for someone with a CS background who has problem with the mechanics of evolution, nothing will do a better job of setting you straight on why not only evolution can work, it is virtually guaranteed to. It's all in the math. Which is what CS is.

* Which is why I like to use GAs when I don't have any idea what the solution should look like. But they can also be great when you do have such an idea, but want to know if there's something completely different you could be missing since the GA has no such preconceptions (unless you program them into the fitness function).

** Nature has the best fitness function: That which propagates gets to propagate.

In radioactive dating they decide how old they want it to be and pick out a dating method that will yield the results they want. Evolution is a fairy tale for grownups that don't understand real science.

So really your problem isn't with evolution, it's with geology and physics.

In radioactive dating they decide how old they want it to be and pick out a dating method that will yield the results they want. Evolution is a fairy tale for grownups that don't understand real science.

You know, it's been said before, even in this thread, but I'll say it again: one of the most corrosive and harmful elements of hard-line conservatism (as manifested, among other places, in the thinking of the "religious right" and other evolution-deniers) is the self-granted license to overturn all meritocratic societal hierarchies involving knowledge, reason, education, expertise, and academic/professional acumen.

So the best minds on the planet can be ignored, since they're the "ivory tower" "elite" -- what do they know? All those university degrees and Nobel Prizes...what are they worth compared to good old, American, homespun, man-in-the-street "common sense"?

So centuries' worth of scientific and philosophical inquiry brings us, at tremendous cost, to a peak of understanding...and all the average American has to do is think about it for a few days (or a few minutes) and see right through it.

It's a darkly brilliant propagandistic tool. Why listen to the experts? Scientists...what do they know? Anything mildly counterintuitive (like Relativity, Quantum Theory, a heliocentric model of the solar system...or evolution) can be brushed easily aside. What do you mean, the earth goes around the sun? "Obviously" the sun goes around the earth...I can see it. How can you say the world is round? We'd all fall off! Evolution? Come on, any idiot can see how little sense that makes. Wise up!

So you have a mutated e coli, now extend that to a complete complex functional system that performs functions that no e coli eve performed or needs to perform. You want to use the gentle slope argument, that these mutations continued to happen and eventually a complex eye was formed.

Not even an eye, how about the ability to eat citrate? That's something which doesn't natively exist in E. coli, in fact the lack of it helps set E. coli apart from related bacteria. But under the right conditions, it can spontaneously arise. I say "spontaneously" here in the sense that nobody designed and implemented the metabolic pathway, it arose unguided from regular, natural, step-wise mutations in the population when there was a strong selective pressure. It didn't pop up all the time, just once. But in the wild, once is often enough. If a new feature crops up that helps an organism out-compete its relatives, the new organism's beneficial DNA will start to make up more and more of the gene pool. Why? Because that trait is passed down to its offspring, which are also more successful than their competitors, enabling them to produce more of their own offspring, and then you have the evens-and-odds situation.

You're arguing as if somebody proposed that a disembodied, lone eye evolved from mutant E. coli and somehow integrated itself into an existing organism to serve as that organism's new eye. That's not what we're saying at all, nobody expects that to happen. We are talking about features of an organism arising through the evolution of that organism's lineage.

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There is no gentle slope to climb and there is no easy way to go from e coli to a complex organism.

Yes there is. Single-celled organism -> colony of single-celled organisms -> specialized cells within a colony -> multicellular organism. Simple multicellular organisms can become more comlex multicellular organisms. Multicellularity has been independently evolved at least 25 times. Lab experiments like those conducted by Martin Boraas have been conducted which caused single-celled algae to form colonial groups of about 8 cells. In order to do so, they had to evolve a means of sticking together, excluding other cells once a certain size was reached, and controlling their own division so that they don't become too large by producing too many algae cells (bigger clumps of cells than 8 are too "shady" for light to pass through them efficiently and ensure even photosynthesis to all the cells). This kind of finding has been repeated by others, even using yeast instead of algae. Why did they form multicellular arrangements? Because it helped them escape predation by an organism that was large enough to eat single algae cells, but not large enough to consume multicellular bodies. That's the selective pressure. It didn't take long for this selective pressure to produce multicellular-like clumps of single-celled algae where there were none before. How can something as complex as multicellularity evolve like that? Probably because single-celled algae have features that enable cell-to-cell communication by chemical means. Random changes and mutations are constantly tweaking the chemicals and their communicator structures, but because there's normally selective advantage any combination of changes that resulted in multicellularity wouldn't be preserved. Until you introduce a predator that spells death to singular cells. Then the selective pressure starts to favor any random change going on at the time which happened to encourage cells to stick together. The existing features, which were being constantly tweaked by mutations anyway, became co-opted to serve a different function and that co-option was favored by the selective pressure of predation.Notice the emphasis on the gradual changes to existing features rather than the wholesale generation of new features out of thin air? That's how evolution normally works.

Your arguments do not dismiss alternative explanations nor do they support the gentle slope of selection theory over billions of years. The good argument is made that the these behaviors were already coded for and express themselves when necessary. If a population does not have the necessary behavior when confronted with an environmental change that is life threatening it dies off in that environment. The organism that is already coded to handle the changing environment expresses the proper response and change in behavior within its coding. Otherwise your saying that the organism mutated to such a degree that it developed a whole new behavior. That's no gentle slope of selection that's where probability theory comes back into play calling it impossible. So its important for your theory to require a gentle change. You can't have it both ways.

In radioactive dating they decide how old they want it to be and pick out a dating method that will yield the results they want. Evolution is a fairy tale for grownups that don't understand real science.

You know, it's been said before, even in this thread, but I'll say it again: one of the most corrosive and harmful elements of hard-line conservatism (as manifested, among other places, in the thinking of the "religious right" and other evolution-deniers) is the self-granted license to overturn all meritocratic societal hierarchies involving knowledge, reason, education, expertise, and academic/professional acumen.

So the best minds on the planet can be ignored, since they're the "ivory tower" "elite" -- what do they know? All those university degrees and Nobel Prizes...what are they worth compared to good old, American, homespun, man-in-the-street "common sense"?

So centuries' worth of scientific and philosophical inquiry brings us, at tremendous cost, to a peak of understanding...and all the average American has to do is think about it for a few days (or a few minutes) and see right through it.

It's a darkly brilliant propagandistic tool. Why listen to the experts? Scientists...what do they know? Anything mildly counterintuitive (like Relativity, Quantum Theory, a heliocentric model of the solar system...or evolution) can be brushed easily aside. What do you mean, the earth goes around the sun? "Obviously" the sun goes around the earth...I can see it. How can you say the world is round? We'd all fall off! Evolution? Come on, any idiot can see how little sense that makes. Wise up!

It was a priest named Bruno who pointed out that the earth was round and supported his findings via mathematics. Other scientists fought the established science of their day over and over again. Religion swings back and forth with the pendulum of science. At one time it was considered one and the same. At other times opposed parties. Now the church teaches evolution as something guided by God. In my opinion, once the Church adopts a particular science, it raises flags in its legitimacy. I have no love for the Church, if you couldn't tell.

In radioactive dating they decide how old they want it to be and pick out a dating method that will yield the results they want. Evolution is a fairy tale for grownups that don't understand real science.

You know, it's been said before, even in this thread, but I'll say it again: one of the most corrosive and harmful elements of hard-line conservatism (as manifested, among other places, in the thinking of the "religious right" and other evolution-deniers) is the self-granted license to overturn all meritocratic societal hierarchies involving knowledge, reason, education, expertise, and academic/professional acumen.

So the best minds on the planet can be ignored, since they're the "ivory tower" "elite" -- what do they know? All those university degrees and Nobel Prizes...what are they worth compared to good old, American, homespun, man-in-the-street "common sense"?

So centuries' worth of scientific and philosophical inquiry brings us, at tremendous cost, to a peak of understanding...and all the average American has to do is think about it for a few days (or a few minutes) and see right through it.

It's a darkly brilliant propagandistic tool. Why listen to the experts? Scientists...what do they know? Anything mildly counterintuitive (like Relativity, Quantum Theory, a heliocentric model of the solar system...or evolution) can be brushed easily aside. What do you mean, the earth goes around the sun? "Obviously" the sun goes around the earth...I can see it. How can you say the world is round? We'd all fall off! Evolution? Come on, any idiot can see how little sense that makes. Wise up!

It was a priest named Bruno who pointed out that the earth was round and supported his findings via mathematics. Other scientists fought the established science of their day over and over again. Religion swings back and forth with the pendulum of science. At one time it was considered one and the same. At other times opposed parties. Now the church teaches evolution as something guided by God. In my opinion, once the Church adopts a particular science, it raises flags in its legitimacy. I have no love for the Church, if you couldn't tell.

Your reading comprehension is as sharp as ever, pal.

First, I was responding to aedgeworth, as you can tell if you look at the quotation above my comment (that's why it's there).

Second, I was making a larger point (which does apply to you as well as him), which is that you're exhibiting an awful contemporary tendency to believe that a layman should go ahead and "rebut" what experts say, whenever it fails to pass some "common sense" test.

You're looking at more than 100 years of science and saying things like "Evolutionary science fails to explain the important things," just because you're not personally familiar with the explanations (and won't bother to read them when they're carefully spoon-fed to you on an Ars board by people more patient than myself).

How many times over will a freely replicating cell produce enough progeny to sample the entire set of possible configurations of 5 million base pairs in 4 billion years? And try telling me that every one of those possible configurations could still be called E. coli.

It's a bogus example. Each division results in some cells inheriting the old parts, the younger cells also age and die.

Unless they are starved or attacked, bacteria DON'T DIE. But REGARDLESS, you are missing the point of the exercise. Get off your lazy ass and do it.

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But one thing is certain, e. coli after 4 billion years is still e. coli.

Oh my fucking god. If you change every basepair in the E.coli genome, it would NOT BE E.COLI ANYMORE.

What was said is that you can't compare COMPUTER SCIENCE, which is not actually science, to biology.

You can easily compare computer science (which is math) to biology, and in fact the comparison is very enlightening. You just need to make sure the math you're using is relevant to biology.

Genetic Algorithms give a mathematical description of how evolution works. And because it's CS, and therefore just math, the description is very general. Any problem whose solution can be encoded as a series of bits (and all information can be encoded as bits, with DNA being a trivial case), and where a population of solutions are randomly modified and then selected according to a fitness function, are subject to the math of Genetic Algorithms. That math says that this process of modification and selection will find local maximums in the solution space -- without any part of the system needing any knowledge about the shape of that solution space*, or any knowledge of what a solution should look like "in the future"! The only thing needed is a method of judging the quality of solutions to decide which should propagate**.

Genetic Algorithms also tells us that once the population converges on a local maximum, given enough time part of the population may jump across a valley to another region with a different local maximum. Also, if the fitness landscape changes, then the population can rapidly change to a new local maximum or even maximums.

And all this can be demonstrated! People actually use GAs all the time to solve engineering problems with hundreds of thousands of variables, or to program FPGAs to conduct complex data processing, or even to create software. The math says it works, practical demonstrations say it works.

This is what Computer Science tells us about evolution: It has sound mathematical backing. It will work. There's no reason to believe it wouldn't.

Stingerman, your problem is that you're treating "Computer Science" as though it's just computer programming. You look at your nice elegant software and think that of course this couldn't have been slapped together randomly. Well of course you couldn't do that yourself. There's only one of you and you'd never be able to iterate rapidly enough to get sufficient generations (not to mention humans suck at "random"). But if you instead wrote software to do that for you so that you can get a population of more than 1, and many, many iterations, then you would find that you can randomly slap together a working program. It would probably not be elegant in every way. It would probably be messy, and suboptimal in some respects. If you started with a solution from an older problem, the new solution might carry a lot of seemingly useless cruft. But in other respects it might use what strikes you as extremely clever solutions you never would have thought of yourself.

I get that you aren't into evolutionary biology. But you should definitely check out Genetic Algorithms. They are fascinating for their own sake, but for someone with a CS background who has problem with the mechanics of evolution, nothing will do a better job of setting you straight on why not only evolution can work, it is virtually guaranteed to. It's all in the math. Which is what CS is.

* Which is why I like to use GAs when I don't have any idea what the solution should look like. But they can also be great when you do have such an idea, but want to know if there's something completely different you could be missing since the GA has no such preconceptions (unless you program them into the fitness function).

** Nature has the best fitness function: That which propagates gets to propagate.

Yes, and who created the fitness function to determine the solution domain? You want to emulate biological evolution, try the algorithm without a fitness function.

Your arguments do not dismiss alternative explanations nor do they support the gentle slope of selection theory over billions of years. The good argument is made that the these behaviors were already coded for and express themselves when necessary.

They checked for that. The E. coli experiment froze representative samples every so often and did gene sequencing to find out of any new genes or modifications to existing genes came up. The ability to metabolize citrate? New genes arose for that new feature. They only began to appear after a certain number of thousands of generations; the didn't occur before that point, and it wasn't present in all subsequent generations - just the branch that metabolized citrate.

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Examination of samples of the population frozen at earlier time points led to the discovery that a citrate-using variant (Cit+) had evolved in the population at some point between generations 31,000 and 31,500. They used a number of genetic markers unique to this population to exclude the possibility that the citrate-using E. coli were contaminants. They also found the ability to use citrate could spontaneously re-evolve in a subset of genetically pure clones isolated from earlier time points in the population's history. Such re-evolution of citrate use was never observed in clones isolated from before generation 20,000. Even in those clones that were able to re-evolve citrate use, the function showed a rate of occurrence on the order of one occurrence per trillion cell divisions. The authors interpret these results as indicating that the evolution of citrate use in this one population depended on one or more earlier, possibly nonadaptive "potentiating" mutations that had the effect of increasing the rate of mutation to an accessible level. (The data they present further suggests that citrate use required at least two mutations subsequent to this "potentiating" mutation) More generally, the authors suggest these results indicate (following the argument of Stephen Jay Gould) "that historical contingency can have a profound and lasting impact" on the course of evolution.[2]

In 2012, a team of researchers working under Lenski reported the results of a genomic analysis of the Cit+ trait that shed light on the genetic basis and evolutionary history of the trait.[5] The researchers had sequenced the entire genomes of twenty-nine clones isolated from various time points in the Ara-3 population's history. They used these sequences to reconstruct the phylogenetic history of the population, which showed that the population had diversified into three clades by 20,000 generations. The Cit+ variants had evolved in one of these, which they called Clade 3. Clones that had been found to be potentiated in earlier research were distributed among all three clades, but were over-represented in Clade 3. This led the researchers to conclude that there had been at least two potentiating mutations involved in Cit+ evolution. The researchers also found that all Cit+ clones sequenced had in their genomes a duplication mutation of 2933 base pairs that involved the gene for the citrate transporter protein used in anaerobic growth on citrate, citT. The duplication is tandem, resulting in two copies that are head-to-tail with respect to each other. This duplication immediately conferred the Cit+ trait by creating a new regulatory module in which the normally silent citT gene is placed under the control of a promoter for an adjacent gene called rnk. The new promoter activates expression of the citrate transporter when oxygen is present, and thereby enabling aerobic growth on citrate. Movement of this new regulatory module (called the rnk-citT module) into the genome of a potentiated Cit- clone was shown to be sufficient to produce a Cit+ phenotype. However, the initial Cit+ phenotype conferred by the duplication was very weak, and only granted a ~1% fitness benefit. The researchers found that the number of copies of the rnk-citT module had to be increased to strengthen the Cit+ trait sufficiently to permit the bacteria to grow well on the citrate, and that further mutations after the Cit+ bacteria became dominant in the population continued to accumulate that refined and improved growth on citrate. The researchers conclude that the evolution of the Cit+ trait suggests that new traits evolve through three stages: potentiation, in which mutations accumulate over a lineage's history that make a trait accessible; actualization, in which one or more mutations render a new trait manifest; and refinement, in which the trait is improved by further mutations.

Again, your argument that all this stuff is simply pre-existing genetic code has already been rebutted. See once more the link I gave you about observations of novel genes popping up. I am not fond of going back in circles just because you've selectively forgotten (or ignored) something I've gone over before.

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If a population does not have the necessary behavior when confronted with an environmental change that is life threatening it dies off in that environment. The organism that is already coded to handle the changing environment expresses the proper response and change in behavior within its coding. Otherwise your saying that the organism mutated to such a degree that it developed a whole new behavior.

This is exactly what happens. And yes, it is a gentle slope. They don't start mutating in reaction to the selective pressure (well, not usually... ) They are just mutating in unguided directions all the time. They are constantly building up to these slopes, but usually the slope isn't useful so there's no pressure to continue going in a certain direction; there's no bias in selection or favor to the existence of the slope, and it doesn't result in improved fitness. In some cases it happens that one of those directions results in a solution that lets an organism become more successful. That initial success lets the organism survive and propagate its genes, because those new genes work better than everyone else's, which means the offspring bearing it have more opportunities to change and find even more efficient solutions over generations. Other times, entire populations die out. That's called extinction, and it's what happened to more than 99% of all things that have ever lived. The only way not to evolve is to become extinct.

How many times over will a freely replicating cell produce enough progeny to sample the entire set of possible configurations of 5 million base pairs in 4 billion years? And try telling me that every one of those possible configurations could still be called E. coli.

It's a bogus example. Each division results in some cells inheriting the old parts, the younger cells also age and die.

Unless they are starved or attacked, bacteria DON'T DIE. But REGARDLESS, you are missing the point of the exercise. Get off your lazy ass and do it.

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But one thing is certain, e. coli after 4 billion years is still e. coli.

Oh my fucking god. If you change every basepair in the E.coli genome, it would NOT BE E.COLI ANYMORE.

You fucking idiot.

Yeah, guess what it would not survive to express itself with that drastic of a change. Nor would it hold up to the current understating of selection but fall within the impossibility of probability. This change has to happen gradually for many millions of years. And, as I stated earlier the homogeneity of the population it must exist in would not allow it.